Would you believe that the first time I heard about World Teachers’ Day was at our regular teachers’ meeting a few weeks ago. I scribbled it on my daily planner so I could remember to observe the event in schools. I’ve been working as a teacher for five years here but I’ve not seen schools celebrating World Teachers’ Day. I do recall celebrating Teachers’ Day in Davao where I also worked as a teacher, but we usually celebrate it on Valentine’s Day. I searched the internet about this event and I was amazed to learn that World Teachers’ Day has been held since 1994. Unfortunately, I haven’t heard of this event until this year. Shame on me!

It seemed not all schools here are aware of this or they might just have been too busy to even think of celebrating World Teachers’ Day. I went to school as normal but all were in their classes. No gatherings or programme installed for the day. Anyway, that’s how engaged the teachers are to their work, so it’s fairly forgivable if they forgot this day. But for me who remembered it, I did a photographic flashback of all the years I spent with my students and colleagues.

The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, “The children are now working as if I did not exist”. ~Maria Montessori~

It’s definitely not a good week to celebrate Mother Language Week.  And definitely not a pleasing idea to bring the students to a museum to see an exhibit when it’s snowing non-stop.  But the plan was agreed beforehand so we proceeded.  Children don’t complain about the weather, anyway.  It’s adults like me who are capable of making a big deal of weather condition.  I took my first group of students to the Museum of World Culture to see an exhibit of students’ works from respective mother tongue classes.  It went quite well since they were only four but taking them on a tram was a big responsibility on my part.  Since they were small, I had to ride with them to and from the museum.  I was so tired already when we rode back to school but my students were still in full spirits, talking and laughing on the tram.  They seemed to be enjoying the whole plan to get away from the classroom.  I wish I had the energy as a child’s again.

Today’s group could have been better because my students’ parents came along.  But the weather was worse than yesterday’s.  I was waiting for them at the kiosk but I decided later to wait for them at the Museum’s entrance instead because heavy snow was falling again.  Thanks to sms facility that made my job easier to contact them.  The day ended well as expected and unlike yesterday, we had almost visited every room where exhibits were, not just in the Mother Language’s exhibit room.

I don’t have pictures of my students at the museum and even I have I am not allowed to post pictures online without the parents’ approval.  This rule concerns all school teachers here so I may leave this post without an image.  However, though irrelevant, I did manage to take some pictures while I was standing at the kiosk pretending to enjoy what was going on around.

February 26 is Mother Language Day in Sweden
Cheers to about 50 different languages, including Filipino!